When I was five my family pulled up to my grandparent’s summer cottage in Copake– with its peeling blue siding and rusting porch glider. Caught in a snowstorm and the cottage was closer than home. When we pulled up I shrieked. Because it is always summer in Copake, that is what I’d always known, and there it was under two feet of snow.

You and I went a few summers ago. You drove because I inherited my grandmother’s fear of being behind the wheel. In the summer, because it is nice to have one place in the world that is always bright and warm, where pears ripen in the tree behind the house, even if the pears are too pitted and gnarled to eat.

We were in the cottage by ourselves. It was raining so we almost hadn’t come at all and everything felt damp, as if we’d just gone swimming in the lake and a dank film of seaweed still clung to our skin. We slept in a double bed but curled up into the center of it. There were the lulling sounds of crickets and cicadas, rain at the windows, just cold enough for a quilt. I was awake again.

I was thinking about the underground goings-on in Sweden, between the Geneva Airport and Jura mountains. The Hadron Collider there, a monstrosity of 5,000 magnets. I dreamt that I was walking along it with accelerated particles like fireflies floating, responding like snowflakes, melting at my touch. In reality, the protons are accelerated to such a speed that, say some quantum physicists, they jump into an extra, fifth dimension, forward in time.

This theory is based on another theory, the “theory of everything”, stating all physical phenomena can be explained by a single linked concept, whereby everything is tied. I like it, this theory of oneness, but I don’t know if I can believe it because in that moment I did not feel linked to you. I felt alone. Because if traveling at the speed of light brings particles forward in time, forward through dimensions, what did it mean for me, for that moment, to be so completely still?

“You ok?” you asked, the question welling up from a dream, and you pulled me in closer with sleep-warmed arms. And I wondered why, in a moment so nice, do I still have the urge to accelerate to the speed of light? Why have the urge to move forward through dimensions when I am so enjoying this one?

The main contingency of a universal “Theory of Everything,” according to Stephen Hawking, is that major paradoxes cannot exist. “I believe things cannot make themselves impossible,” Hawking said.

We are blank page people, you and I– and so I try, now, I try so hard, to draw happiness with the eraser of my pencil. Leave no trace but a dip in a mattress, the shiny pink-zipper burn of lips on your cheek.